I wonder also if 'Abercrombie's vowel', found in a restricted set of words
in Scottish English such as 'never', 'next', 'seven', 'eleven', 'every',
'devil', 'heaven', 'bury', 'shepherd', etc., would qualify here. It hasn't
been transcribed this way in the past - Abercrombie (1954)* gives it as a
centralised CV3, i.e. [E] with an umlaut, and most of the other accounts of
the vowel I'm familiar with stick to this transcription. The vowel
supposedly contrasts with [E] and [I] in the accents in which it's found,
such that 'river', 'never' and 'sever' all have different stressed vowels.
I say 'supposedly', because from my own observations - including those of
my own speech - I'd say there's actually substantial overlap of
Abercrombie's vowel with ScEng [I] (which is itself retracted and lowered
relative to the value referred to by this symbol in, say, RP), such that
for a lot of Scottish speakers 'heaven' and 'given' can be a minimal pair.
Dom Watt.
* Abercrombie, D. (1954) A Scottish vowel. Le maitre phonetique,
July-December 1954: 23-4.
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Dominic Watt
Department of English
University of Aberdeen
Old Aberdeen AB24 3UB
Scotland
Tel.: 01224 272634
Fax: 01224 272624
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
www.abdn.ac.uk/english/staff/watt.hti
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